CHAPTER XLV

*

And rapidly the Spawer drew back, from its intricate shadowy by-paths, to the great broad highway of Life.

How it would have fared with him but for that revitalising power of love, if there had been no Pam to cling to and sustain him, no man can positively say. The lonely Maurice Ethelbert Wynne of our latter chapters, void of hope or happiness or aim, might have turned up his hands and sunk under the deep sea without a struggle. But Pam was hands and eyes, and feet and lips, and thinker for them both.

Emma Morland brought the letters round in these early days, but Pam opened them, at the Spawer's express bidding, and read them to him aloud in her musical fluty voice--the voice that had won her a place in his heart before even he had set eyes upon her. And as she read, the Spawer, sitting in the big chair by the open sunlit window, with cushions under him of Pam's placing, would explain to her the various allusions; let her into his life; throw open all its gateways to the girl. In the inmost shelter of his soul he felt as though he needed the comfort of Pam's companionship.

"Nixey" stood for So-and-So, he would explain to her; and "Jack" was the brother of So-and-So--the fellow that did this and that and the other that he 'd told her about, did n't she remember?

And did n't Pam remember? Oh, my Heaven! Pam remembered. Not a word he ever said to her that she forgot.

Then, if there were any letters to answer, Pam would seat herself at the table, with his writing-case thrown open, and dip deft fingers here, for envelopes; and deft fingers there, for paper; and draw forth the pen, and wield it as though armed for the fray; and would spear the ink-pot with it, and wait upon his words with a persuasive "Yes, dear?"

And the Spawer would make prodigious pretensions of thinking, and not a word come to him sometimes, because of the girl's face. His mind held up its thought as an obstinate cow does milk, and never a drop could he squeeze from it. All he could think of was Pam.

"Oh, bother the letters!" he would tell her. "They stop my thinking about you. Why must I pawn my attention to a horrid old business screed when I want never to take it from you?"

"Don't you?" says Pam gladly, and melts over him with her smile, wrapping him up in such a heavenly mantle of indulgence and love and devotion that he almost feels himself among the saints.

And oh! the joyousness of that return to the outer life, when Pam led the Spawer out at last, she carrying a cushion and a little net-bag of literary food (a French reader and the like); and they betook themselves to the harvest-field, and sat down under the blue sky in the stubble, with their backs against the golden stocks, and watched the elevated figure of Arny riding over the sea of waving corn, like another Neptune, turning off the wheat from the tip with rhythmic sweeps of his trident; his eyes steadfast upon the tumbling crest of corn beside him; and they contemplated the busy shirt-sleeves of the band-makers, pulling out their two thin wisps of straw from the recumbent "shawves," splicing them dexterously, and twisting them--across their chests and under their arm-pits, till their arms flap like the wings of a crowing rooster--into a stout-stranded band, that they lay out in the stubble alongside the flat heaps of fallen grain; and they watched the harvestmen following, who rake up the loose corn into a round bundle against the flat of their leg, walk with it, so clipped, to the ready-made band, depose it there, stoop, gather the two ends of the band in their strong hands, squeeze the sheaf in with the knee, bind it, make a securing tuck with the straw, and taking up the trim-waisted shock by its plaited girdle, cast it aside out of the path of the reaper on its next round.

And then, when "lowance" time was proclaimed, this stock where Maurice and his Pamela were seated would be made the headquarters of the repast. Here would come the welcome brown basket, and the carpet bag with its bottlenecks protruding; the blue mugs and the tin pannikins; the cheese and the bread; the pasties and the sweet cakes; the tea and the beer. And here would come Dixon's genial voice, greeting them from afar:

"Noo then, Mr. Wynne! 'Ow div ye fin' yersen ti morn? Very comfortable, bi t' looks of ye. Ye 're in good 'ands, it seems."

And when the Spawer grows equal to it, it becomes a daily obligation for them to wander across the intervening stubble and pasture to Barclay's farm--where the sails of his reaper can be seen churning the blue sky above the hedge level, like the paddle of a steamer--just to give Barclay's stocks a turn, and show themselves not forgetful of their deliverer. The time comes, of course, when they must cease thanking him with their lips, but Pam's mere gaze upon him is a gratitude, and Barclay would have missed it, if she failed him one day, as he would miss his pipe or his "lowance."

"Ah," said he, on a certain occasion, looking over with a manifest nice eye of critical observation, and finding no fault, "If ah 'd 'ad a lass like you to tek me at start, ah mud 'a been a better man, an' a richer."

"But there are others," Pam told him encouragingly, "... besides me."

"Ay," Barclay cut in, with a grim humor. "There is. Ower monny, lass. Bud they 'd 'ave to be good uns after ah 've 'ad you to sample. Ah would n't tek onny rubbish noo, an' it 'd 'ave to be rubbishin' stuff 'at 'd tek me. Ah 'm ower well known 'ereabouts. 'Appen ah mud get chance wi' next farm if ah change."

But the seed of resolution germinated in Pam's breast, and some days later, getting Barclay to herself, it pushed its pure blades through the warm soil all suddenly.

"... Oh, Mr. Barclay," she begged him, going close under his broad chest, and showing the peeping hands of petition. "You won't be angry with me ... please?"

"Nay, that ah weean't," Barclay protested staunchly. "Oot wi' it! What 'ave ah been doin' noo?"

"I want to ask you something," Pam continued, a little more softly, and a little more rapidly. "... Something very particular. I want you to promise something."

"Ay," said Barclay assentively. "Ah can promise ye, lass. Ah can promise onnybody, so far as that gans. But it's keepin' of it 'at's not i' mah line."

"If you promise _me_ ... you 'll keep it," Pam insinuated very softly, but with an almost irresistible forcefulness.

"Ah 'm none so sure," Barclay reflected. "Ah know what ye want to ask me."

"What?" said Pam.

"Ye want to ask me to gie it up."

"Yes," said Pam, after a pause, "I do."

"Ah 've tried ... lots o' times," Barclay admitted.

"But not for _me_!" Pam urged. "Not for the sake of anybody. Oh, Mr. Barclay ... you don't know how unhappy I 've been at times about you, of late ... to think that you 've saved my life--and his life--and put this happiness in our way ... and all the time you 're not taking any care of your own life ... at all."

"Why, lass," Barclay told her, but visibly troubled about the eyes by her solicitude. "Ah 'm sorry ye 've let me be a trouble to ye. Ah 've been nowt bud trouble to missen an' ivverybody. But where would ye be? ... an 'im too, if ah 'd kep' pledge sin' last time ah signed 'er? Eh?"

"I know; I know," Pam admitted. "I 've thought of that, too."

"Ay," Barclay took up, pleased with her admission. "It's a caution when ye come to think on it. If ah 'ad n't been mekkin' a swill-tub o' missen, an' walked back when ah did--it 'd 'a been good-by to ye, an' long live teetawtallers. It just seems as though Lord 'ad called me to Oommuth for t' puppos--though ah did n't know it at time. An' 'ow am ah to know, if 'E calls o' me ageenn, same road ... 'at 'E 'as n't seummut else 'E 's wantin' doin'? Eh noo?"

"Perhaps..." Pam suggested pleadingly, "... perhaps it was n't God that called you, Mr. Barclay ... but it was God that sent you back. Don't you think it might be that?"

"Noo, ah sewd n't wonder," Barclay decided, with obvious admiration for the girl's ingenuity. "But it 'll be a rum un for me to know which way 'E wants me to gan ... or which end 'E 's at."

"... And you 'll promise me, won't you?" Pam besought him, and took hold of his watch-chain. "You 'll promise me to fight your very best ... for my sake."

"Ay," said Barclay, after a pause. "Ah can bud try."

"You 'll try hard, though?" Pam adjured him--finding too much fatalism in the tone of his promise for her satisfaction.

"No.... when ah say ah 'll try, ah mean ah 'll try!" Barclay reassured her. "Ah s'll try my very best for t' sake of 'oo asked me."

And Father Mostyn and the Doctor are constant attendants upon the Spawer's recovery too, and stay for meals whenever they want them; and tell him when the whiskey flask is running low.

And it comes to be decided that their marriage shall not take place for a year. And meanwhile the Spawer is going to stay where he is; and Pam is to push on with her music, and her French, and with her English, and fill her dear little head with the intellectual fare for which it has always hungered. And she is to do no more letter-carrying. Father Mostyn has inhibited her from that with an _ex cathedra_ usage of the great signet. To remain at the Post Office in an official capacity in face of present circumstances would be an act of rebellion towards the Church, and exceedingly offensive to Jehovah. As the girl's spiritual and corporeal guardian, he charges himself with her care until she can be decently and respectably married. And they will go, all three of them, to Hunmouth at times, by Tankard's 'bus (oh, bliss! oh, heavenly rapture!) for purposes of shopping ... and the sheer pleasure of it.

And the Spawer talks seriously of coming back to Ullbrig after the honeymoon, and fitting up a little place for their own two selves, where they can be near Father Mostyn, and all their old friends; and where he can work earnestly, and without distractions; and where they can escape all the jealousies and soul-corrupting ambitions of towns and places where they "live."

"Oh, little woman!" he tells Pam, "I can't bear to think of your giving up your own dear self, and letting your soul be shaped to the conventional pattern of the world. I want you to be what you are--and for what I love you. You shall see all the big places, of course, dear. We 'll save up our coppers and manage that somehow. But let 's see 'em from the outside. Let 's go and look at them through glass windows, as though they were so many great shops, and come back to our own humble happy life, and break bread and be thankful. The world for us, dear, is just our two selves. We 're two little human hemispheres that go to make our one globe, and if we 're only happy in ourselves ... why, let the other planets go hang! Because you love me I just feel I don't care how many people hate me. They can hate their heads off. They can cry 'pish' to my music. They can turn aside their faces when I go by, as though I were a pestilence. What I do I want to do now for you. I feel I would rather write a little song that pleases you, love, than compose a Beethoven symphony for the world to bow to. And why? Because, dearest, I know that the world is as ready to kick me as to bestow one ha'porth of its kindness ... but You! All the pleasure I can give to you ... is just an investment, which you can pay back to me in love at a thousand per cent."

"Is n't it funny?" says Pam, though without showing the least appreciation of the avowed humor, "... what love is. I 've thought the same as you, too, but not put so beautifully. I just want us to try and be like what we are now, in our hearts, as long as we live. At times (do you?) I like to think of you as belonging to me ... as though you were every bit mine. And at other times ... I feel frightened of having you. The responsibility seems somehow too great. And then I just think of myself as belonging to you. And all I want ... is to creep into your heart, dear, and for you to shelter me. Oh, Maurice! To think. Six months ago ... three months ago ... I had no thought of you, or you of me! And we might never have met each other; never have loved each other! Is n't it dreadful?"

"What the eye does n't see, darling!" Maurice tells her, "... the heart does n't grieve. What we never know we never miss. But now we 're going to make up for what might have been, are n't we?"

Pam says yes, they are. "And oh," she says, "if you had n't found me you might have found somebody else, Morrie dear, do you think it possible that I may be standing in the way of somebody you don't know at all ... that you might love better?"

"Very likely you are, dear!" Maurice says, acting Job's comforter. "But anyway, I 'm ready to risk you, and take my chance of what may be for what is."

And this time Pam is ready to risk it too, and does not tell the Spawer, as once she told Ginger:

"There must be no chance in love!"

*